Searches and legal checks
| Title | Who owns the property, on what basis, and with what rights and obligations attached. |
|---|---|
| Tenure | Whether ownership is outright, held for a term of years, or shared with an owning body. Each carries different costs and duties. |
| Local searches | What the local authority knows: planning decisions, road adoption status, enforcement notices, nearby schemes. |
| Environmental | Flooding, ground stability, contamination history, and past uses of the land. |
| Utilities and drainage | Whether the property is connected to public services and who owns the pipes and cables that serve it. |
| Enquiries | Direct questions to the seller about disputes, alterations, guarantees, shared arrangements and what is included. |
| Binding point | When the parties become committed. Its name and timing differ by jurisdiction; the concept does not. |
The legal stage of a transaction has a reputation for being slow and mysterious. It is slow, but it is not mysterious: it is a set of questions with fixed answers, most of which have to be requested from third parties who reply on their own timetables.
Title
The first question is what the seller actually owns. Ownership of land is rarely a simple boundary and nothing else. Attached to it are rights the property enjoys over other land, such as access along a shared drive or the passage of drainage, and obligations it owes, such as a duty to maintain a fence or a covenant restricting what may be built. These run with the land, not with the person, so they pass to the buyer.
Boundaries are a routine source of dispute because registered plans usually show a general line rather than a legally precise one. Where a fence has moved, or an extension approaches a boundary, this is worth resolving before the binding point rather than after it.
Tenure
How ownership is held varies widely between jurisdictions. It may be outright and indefinite; it may be a long lease of a defined term with a ground rent and service charges; it may involve a management company in which owners hold shares; it may be a form of shared or commonhold arrangement. What matters practically is the same in every case: what you own, for how long, what you must pay, what you must maintain, and what you may not do without consent.
Searches
Searches are enquiries of public bodies and data holders. The common categories are the local authority's records, environmental data, drainage and water, and whatever regional risk applies, such as mining, ground stability or flooding. They answer questions the seller cannot: whether the road outside is publicly maintained, whether a road scheme is planned, whether the site sits on former industrial land, whether a nearby permission would change the outlook.
Enquiries of the seller
Alongside searches sit direct questions to the seller. These cover disputes with neighbours, works carried out and whether they were permitted and signed off, guarantees still in force, shared responsibilities, and precisely which fixtures are included in the sale. A slow sale is very often a sale where the answers to these questions have to be reconstructed from memory.
The binding point
Every system has a moment before which either side can walk away and after which they cannot without cost. Some systems place it early, so that the checks above are done before an offer is made. Others place it late, so that the checks are done after acceptance and the parties remain free for weeks. Neither arrangement is inherently better, but the difference explains why advice written for one country can be actively misleading in another.
This page describes the general shape of the legal stage. It is not legal advice, and the categories, names and sequence differ from one jurisdiction to the next.